Saturday 23 October 2010 19.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 23 October 2010 19.04 EDT

The rumour in Manchester is that Coleen Rooney wanted an audience with the Pope to ask what she should do about Wayne. It's one of those stories that journalists don't like to check too strenuously because even if it isn't true, it ought to be.

Admittedly, a moment of reflection suggests a meeting would have been pointless. Coleen must have known in advance that he would not tear up Catholic doctrine on the sanctity of marriage for her sake and tell her to divorce Wayne and get another man. Nor can I imagine him warning that she must insist on a condom given the company Wayne keeps at night. If the Pope won't do it for Africans, he is unlikely to do it for Liverpudlians.

On the other hand, it is entirely plausible that Coleen would expect the Pope to make time to see her. Given the attention they attract and the money Wayne expects to earn, the Rooneys are the most famous Catholic couple in Britain. Who could dare refuse to meet the wife of a man who claims to be worth £200,000 a week?

For a moment in 2008, it seemed that such lavish rewards would vanish. The bubble in football like the bubble in the economy would be replaced by an interlude of sanity. No such luck. Last week, as Rooney demanded a salary of £10.4m, the City prepared to gorge itself on a bonus pot of £7bn. "If you had just come back from a couple of years on a desert island you could be forgiven for thinking that the crash had not happened," Brian Bell, an authority on Britain's extreme wealth inequality from the London School of Economics, told me. He added, somewhat unnecessarily, that the failure to learn the lessons of the past makes a future crash more likely.

I understand his foreboding. For when compared folly for folly, extravagance for extravagance, even football – a game swamped by greed, stupidity, debt and hubris – turns out to handle its affairs better than the City.

The delusion of the 2000s was that managers were worth vast amounts because their genius could transform an organisation's fortune. The sports economist Stefan Szymanski found the evidence to support the proposition in football was close to nonexistent. A club's fate was determined by how much money it had; the manager was almost an irrelevance. Only two could claim to have made a difference – Arsène Wenger and Alex Ferguson. Tellingly, both are aware of the dangers of what Alan Sugar called the "prune juice effect" on the Premier League, where money pours in at one end from Sky and out the other to agents and players.

No such critical self-awareness troubles the City. Its managers were worse than irrelevancies, they were calamities. They did not understand the risks their banks were running. Now that we are all suffering the consequences, they continue to throw money away on bonuses, despite the evidence that lavish rewards provide traders with an incentive to maximise risk in the search for short-term profits.

We can dismiss the conventional explanation that average pay for the City's top 75,000 workers rose from £151,000 in 1998 to £314,000 in 2008 because, like top-rate footballers, they were exceptional talents. A talent shared by 75,000 people is not exceptional. In any case, with interest rates now close to zero, banks can just engage in a carry trade, taking money from the Bank of England and buying assets. Until the next bubble bursts in the bond or emerging markets, any trader of average intelligence should be making profits.

The cynical explanation for City pay holds that the men at the top of Goldman Sachs and Barclays want to give large bonuses to their staff to justify their even larger bonuses. But CEOs in the rest of Britain do not feel the need to provide cover for their acquisitiveness. Terry Leahy did not throw money at Tesco checkout girls before he took £5.2m this year, which, I accept, is only half of what Rooney wants.

Rather than being cynical, it is better to regard the City and Wall Street as cults, which follow irrational rituals because that is their custom. Asking why financiers are paying £7bn in bonuses is like asking why Scientologists engage in brainwashing or members of Opus Dei engage in self-flagellation. They do it because that is what they do.

A more pertinent question is why owners let them get away it and don't try to find a way round what economists call the principal-agent problem. In theory, private institutions are run for the benefit of shareholders (principals). But because their agents (managers) are in control, they can divert profits into their pockets and the pockets of players and dealers. In the Premier League, football owners have abandoned standard business practices in response to the loss of revenue. Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour are plutocrats who accept losses because they bought Chelsea and Manchester City as status symbols. The Glazers, who own Manchester United, are speculators who hope to sweat the assets to pay off their debt and then sell the club on at a huge profit, a strategy which, as Rooney rightly pointed out, is pushing United towards being a second-rank team.

But rich men have always wanted playthings and asset-strippers have always looked for victims. The behaviour of bank shareholders is much more mysterious. Despite seeing their predecessors wiped out, they continue to allow their agents to rip them off. The comparison between banking and football becomes even less flattering when you consider that football has realised at last that it cannot live on prune juice forever. In 2012, UEFA hopes to stop the sport being taken over by oligarchs and cap players' wages by requiring clubs to match spending to what they earn through football-related income. Even if you believe that Manchester City, Chelsea, Barcelona and Real Madrid will try to find ways round the new rules, you cannot doubt that this is an attempt at serious change.

No similar reforming spirit exists in banking for a reason which should shame bankers and regulators. If Manchester United were to go bust, the government would not bail it out, however deeply its fans wanted it to. If Barclays were to go bust, the government would have to bail it out regardless of whether the taxpayers wanted to or not. When set against banking, Wayne Rooney is an honourable man in an honest trade.